Today in the northern hemisphere we have leaned about as far away from the sun as we are able, and the amount of light and warmth received is at its nadir; the moon races round us in a white-lit lunar descant, and we ourselves whirl on this earth’s surface at the speed of sleep to watch and make sense of it all. From a simple Amen of planetary mechanics, the poetic and spiritual voice of every race and probably every species composes its narrative of life and (so dark, so cold, so silent) death.

Space looks like the ocean – where few eyes venture beyond the surface. This image presents our planet Earth, and scattered around it flecks that represent active satellites, inactive satellites, and debris: green, gray, red. Each object is much, much smaller than the dot that depicts it. Yet each dot is still a dot.

View the 3D presentation here

I looked at this picture of space crap, and imagined current or future spaceflights from Earth, tiptoeing into the sky like bathers at the polluted beach who, if they even dare swim, must pick their way through plastic flotsam and toxic jetsam and things that could, with any lack of luck, kill them. And as that metaphor surged up like a gritty wave, I thought of all the news stories citing our degraded oceans, the cradle of life made a sewer by the most self-centered, wasteful generations ever to wander the planet. Our destructiveness equal to our creativity, perhaps: is that a balance that Nature will always strike?

Our politicians continue to smoke the mirrors by talking about nothing of substance, and of making “security” or family life an issue of national governance, when much more serious issues continue to press.

Imagine you run a family farm, and one of the workers was painting a fence when 3 acres of tomatoes needed to be picked or rot on the vine. Imagine you run a business, and your accountant can’t explain where funds are going. Imagine you live in a village and one family is using the community well as a toilet.

The study of impermanence both demands and cultivates a steady mind. You would wish some of that learned gravity on our shrill leaders, whose gaming is driven at least in part by their fluttering avoidance of mortality, a blindness adopted to ward away their own short time upon the planet.

Politician or citizen, this week we are offered a lesson in humility. Not two weeks ago, observers in one of the world’s scientific groups detected a small asteroid far out of the normal plane of heavenly bodies, whose orbit around the sun carried it in the direction of the Earth. You might imagine the observer who first detected it:

Stars that have lit our little night, also fall.

Would I keep them in the heavens? I can’t catch a star. Would I keep their light from halting? All light flickers, falters, fails. I can’t breathe them higher; or should I, blowing on a candle flame, that wind might burn them brighter, but also burns them faster, gutter, gone.

I guess, embrace the failure (which is not failure, only gravity-graced easing down to earth), learn tearful laughter, joyful departures, let my heart be beautifully marred, so love is written on it while it beats; so beating it repeats that name, these names, this worldful of names, one moment at a time.

… remaining were no shorter, no more weighted, than they were the day before; but the pang of loss or brevity was, quite suddenly, intense: I was wakened by a thought.

As every life is change, and we are bound to say goodbye, then how precious the gift of knowing it, to see the light, that makes you visible to me, and me to you.

The only tears I mind are the ones that were not cried, that drown love, that make us run and hide.

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And then the ramp was pulled up and the loading doors of the truck were closed; closed, too, the door of the storage unit, now emptied of its cargo; and years of living lurched away behind that burp of diesel, as though I had never owned it, and it had never laid claim to me.

I assume these trinkets and kitchen kitsch and bedroom comforts will join us again, that side of the Atlantic, but who knows? There are no guarantees, and all shapes and sizes of pirate. Maybe we can begin again… again. I half desire it.

Yesterday’s ice storm was erased by the night, and my little portion of earth has rolled around into sunshine, clouds dispersed, streets cleared, warm.

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My flight (flight away from…? flight toward…?) departs in seven days, one week into which I will pour as many tangible tasks as I am able: a last box of odds and ends to be packed, a shipment of our personal belongings to be negotiated and executed, a three-automotive albatross (one broken car, one damaged car, one motorcycle to be stored), a “last dance” or “parting dance” in Boston, a rented house to be cleaned cleaned cleaned of everything that was us and is me.

I sat under the rain and the brim of my hat dripped as eaves drip and through the brim of my hat dripping as eaves I watched the leaves handing those drops heaven to earth one palm at a time, as though breaking the water’s fall. I moved under the skirt of the tree and let her shadow me, the arc of the rain drawing an ephemeral circle where the tree’s limbs reached, and stayed there a while, while the large drops collected above, larger and then larger and then falling with a plash unhindered onto the brim of my hat, as though the eaves had shrunk, or the storm had grown.

For miles and miles and miles the southbound highway: stalled. A fog of idling cars’ combustion flogs the air: no progress. Stagnation is repeated in a wide arc to the city’s west and south. Every major and minor artery clogged.

To the east there are no cars: maybe a ferry or two: or a fishing vessel: Here Lies the Atlantic.

Glut is stamped into the morning of a major American city. Stamped on every other, major and minor, from sea to shining sea. “Glut” is the root of “gluttony”, one of seven cardinal sins. Wisdom traditions wisely name destructive behavior “Sin”.